Oooooops, I totally forgot checking this thread. Apologies . Anyway, happy new year to all people and all

And, as promised, here are my changes to Yabb 2.4:

File cgi-bin/yabb2/Sources/Decoder.pl:

Find the line (near the end of the file) that says:

Code

&captcha($captcha);

and change it. Now, my idea was to add an extra 2 letters at the beginning and 2 letters at the end. So it became:

Code

&captcha("XX".$captcha."XX");

And that's it! Yabb registration dialog will show 4 more letters in the CAPTCHA, but they'll never count as the actual string!

You can change this to your heart's delight, the "XX" and "XX" are an example. You can choose to add only characters at the beginning, or at the end, or both. (of course, if you know about string handling in perl you can do much more evil stuff, but I'm assuming you don't!)

But I wanted to let the users know that they have to omit those 4 letters, so I changed file:

cgi-bin/yabb2/Languages/English/Register.lng

in the line that goes:

Code

'casewarning' => 'Please type exactly what text appears in the image.<br />The characters must be typed in the same order,<br />and they are case-sensitive.',

to

Code

'casewarning' => 'Please type exactly what text appears in the image,<br><strong>without the first two and last two characters.</strong><br />The characters must be typed in the same order,<br />and they are case-sensitive.',

Again, you should change the message to reflect the changes you made. This simple mod made all spambots unable to register and post, and if they ever get a whiff of it, I'll simply change it to something else now that I know how! I hope it helps people.

Thank you! So far at least, not a single spammer has been able to register since I made these edits, although it's somewhat early for me to confirm this entirely.Edited:

Oh yeah. A big confirmation on that! Those edits definitely worked! Spammers are being stopped left and right now.

I made the edits as instructed, tested its implementation, and it worked wonderfully.

On an unrelated note as I indicated above, the YaBB quote button isn't working for this topic; at least for me (actually; only with the post I quoted). I improvised.

« Last Edit: Jan 13th, 2012 at 9:08pm by Bill Myers »

Morning, noon, or night, have a great one!

Note: Like most others, this forum doesn't allow us to freely edit our posts or topics to make corrections as needed, so please remember to look for subsequent posts if you see any mistakes or outdated information. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Note: Like most others, this forum doesn't allow us to freely edit our posts or topics to make corrections as needed, so please remember to look for subsequent posts if you see any mistakes or outdated information. Sorry for the inconvenience.

I join Bill Myers in thanking ggn for the antispam hack for YaBB 2.4. I would just note that the language about the characters to be omitted when entering the captcha should be changed not only in Register.lng, but also in:

I join Bill Myers in thanking ggn for the antispam hack for YaBB 2.4. I would just note that the language about the characters to be omitted when entering the captcha should be changed not only in Register.lng, but also in:

LogInOut.lngSendTopic.lngPost.lng

« Last Edit: Jan 16th, 2012 at 12:39am by Bill Myers »

Morning, noon, or night, have a great one!

Note: Like most others, this forum doesn't allow us to freely edit our posts or topics to make corrections as needed, so please remember to look for subsequent posts if you see any mistakes or outdated information. Sorry for the inconvenience.

I join Bill Myers in thanking ggn for the antispam hack for YaBB 2.4. I would just note that the language about the characters to be omitted when entering the captcha should be changed not only in Register.lng, but also in:

LogInOut.lngSendTopic.lngPost.lng

Thank you George!

Evidently, unless it's a bug, YaBB's moderators aren't allowing modifications in posts to make corrections after a certain amount of time has passed (or possibly Corey if he's the only one who can change the settings).Edited:

Sorry I'm not able to correct mistakes I've made in my older posts, but here is the reason:Corey Chapman wrote on Jan 16th, 2012 at 6:27pm:

... The time limit here for modifying or deleting ones' own posts is 2 days. After 30 mins from the post time stamp, it will display the message that it has been modified.

« Last Edit: Jan 16th, 2012 at 8:03pm by Bill Myers »

Morning, noon, or night, have a great one!

Note: Like most others, this forum doesn't allow us to freely edit our posts or topics to make corrections as needed, so please remember to look for subsequent posts if you see any mistakes or outdated information. Sorry for the inconvenience.

I don't think it is a bug or a setting I have locked down as far as modifying posts goes. Since this setting has existed, it has remained the same here. The time limit here for modifying or deleting ones' own posts is 2 days. After 30 mins from the post time stamp, it will display the message that it has been modified.

Moderators, assuming they can modify someone else's posts, can either modify indefinitely or perhaps only within that 2 days (although I thought it was indefinitely because I know that is how it works for Administrators). There is no setting for this.

I don't think it is a bug or a setting I have locked down as far as modifying posts goes. Since this setting has existed, it has remained the same here. The time limit here for modifying or deleting ones' own posts is 2 days. After 30 mins from the post time stamp, it will display the message that it has been modified.

Moderators, assuming they can modify someone else's posts, can either modify indefinitely or perhaps only within that 2 days (although I thought it was indefinitely because I know that is how it works for Administrators). There is no setting for this.

Yes, that's been my experience as well. Admins and moderators can modify posts without restrictions. I've always felt that members should be able to do the same, which is why I've continued to allow it. To do otherwise seems overly restrictive, and user-unfriendly.

But to each their own.

On a personal note about restricting the ability of members to modify their own posts, when a member is unable to correct a mistake, especially when it comes to giving advice to others, a lot of bad, and incorrect information stays online. That can't be good.

Of course, human nature being the way it is, corrections to bad information isn't likely to be updated, so I guess bad information will stay online no matter what.

Thankfully, at least we can point out previous mistakes with corrections in new posts even if older posts can't be corrected.

Morning, noon, or night, have a great one!

Note: Like most others, this forum doesn't allow us to freely edit our posts or topics to make corrections as needed, so please remember to look for subsequent posts if you see any mistakes or outdated information. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Since this forum doesn't allow us to correct mistakes in our posts after they've been online for 2 days, I wanted to post corrected instructions to clarify them for anyone who wants to keep spammers from registering in your forum.

I've confirmed that ggn's initial instructions (here in this post) combined with George's additional instructions (here in this post) work as they're supposed to, as we haven't had a single spammer get through the registration process since we made these very simple edits.

Here they are in a 2-step process that involves 5 files:

Go to file cgi-bin/yabb2/Sources/Decoder.pl:

Find the line (near the end of the file) that reads:

&captcha($captcha);

Change the line above as follows to:

&captcha("XX".$captcha."XX");

Note: You'll want to let the users know that they have to omit those 4 letters, so the following 4 files should be changed (see the change below):

cgi-bin/yabb2/Languages/English/LogInOut.lng

cgi-bin/yabb2/Languages/English/Post.lng

cgi-bin/yabb2/Languages/English/Register.lng

cgi-bin/yabb2/Languages/English/SendTopic.lng

- Change to be made in each of the 4 files above -

In the line that reads:

'casewarning' => 'Please type exactly what text appears in the image.<br />The characters must be typed in the same order,<br />and they are case-sensitive.',

Change to:

'casewarning' => 'Please type exactly what text appears in the image,<br />without the first two and last two characters.<br />The characters must be typed in the same order,<br />and they are case-sensitive.',

That's it!

As always, it's recommended that you keep a copy of the original files you are changing in case a problem comes up, and you need to upload any one of them again.

Another recommendation is to sign up for a test registration to see what the public sees. You can obviously delete that test membership after you've confirmed that everything is working properly.

Edited:

Again, since implementing these changes, our forum hasn't had one single spam-bot registration get through; only legitimate registrations have been processed.

« Last Edit: Jan 17th, 2012 at 7:31pm by Bill Myers »

Morning, noon, or night, have a great one!

Note: Like most others, this forum doesn't allow us to freely edit our posts or topics to make corrections as needed, so please remember to look for subsequent posts if you see any mistakes or outdated information. Sorry for the inconvenience.

I still haven't had one single spam registration get through since I implemented your mod; just legitimate registrations that were processed without a hitch.

I was surprised that the spam registrations stopped entirely because I had wrongly believed that pretty much all attempted registrations were being done by human spammers trying to register.

Go figure!

And thanks to George again, too, because those other files needed to be changed as well, which was easily done.

Morning, noon, or night, have a great one!

Note: Like most others, this forum doesn't allow us to freely edit our posts or topics to make corrections as needed, so please remember to look for subsequent posts if you see any mistakes or outdated information. Sorry for the inconvenience.

This forum doesn't allow the modification of posts after 5 days even when information needs to be corrected or updated. As such, there will be misinformation throughout this forum, at least certainly in some of my posts, so take things with a grain of salt.

It came to my attention in this post that a possible error can be made with ggn's anti-spam hack if you aren't careful about typing text exactly as it should be typed. This should include spaces and characters in the coding that you see in the instructions below.

As such, please make note of the following instructions to implement this very effective anti-spam hack to stop spam-bots from registering in your forum.

Human bots, or "Hu-bots" can be effectively stopped by selectingPre-registration with admin membership approval.

This anti-spam hack is a 2-step process that involves 5 files:

First file to edit: cgi-bin/yabb2/Sources/Decoder.pl

Find the line (near the end of the file) that reads:

Code

&captcha($captcha);

Change the line above as follows to:

Code

&captcha("XX".$captcha."XX");

Note: You'll want to let people know that they have to omit those 4 letters (XX and XX), or any letters you choose, so the following 4 files should also be edited as instructed below in the code boxes:

cgi-bin/yabb2/Languages/English/LogInOut.lng

cgi-bin/yabb2/Languages/English/Post.lng

cgi-bin/yabb2/Languages/English/Register.lng

cgi-bin/yabb2/Languages/English/SendTopic.lng

- The following change should be made in each of the 4 files above -

In the line that reads:

Code

'casewarning' => 'Please type exactly what text appears in the image.<br />The characters must be typed in the same order,<br />and they are case-sensitive.',

Change to:

Code

'casewarning' => 'Please type exactly what text appears in the image,<br /><strong>without the first two and last two characters.</strong><br />The characters must be typed in the same order,<br />and they are case-sensitive.',

To the left of your auto-generated Verification Code, this edit will produce the following result:

Your Verification Code is:Please type exactly what text appears in the image,without the first two and last two characters.The characters must be typed in the same order,and they are case-sensitive.

As always, it's recommended that you keep a copy of the original files you are changing in case a problem comes up, and you need to upload any one of them again.

Remember to upload all of these files in ASCII; not binary.

Another recommendation is to sign up for a test registration to see what the public sees. You can obviously delete that test membership after you've confirmed that everything is working properly.

Verification note (YaBB 2.4): As of a week or so ago in the forum that I operate, this anti-spam hack has stopped over 300,000 attempted registrations by spam-bots.Not one single spam-bot has been able to register!

Recommendation: Even though I can personally confirm that this anti-spam hack works as advertised, thanks to ggn authoring it, and I recommend it, it's probably better to install an anti-spam mod that's been written for YaBB if you know how to install mods.

I don't know how to install mods, which is why I implemented ggn's anti-spam hack.

Unfortunately, spammers will most likely come up with a new way to spam our forums. Meanwhile, we have this anti-spam tool, and others to stop spammers cold.

Good luck.

Morning, noon, or night, have a great one!

Note: Like most others, this forum doesn't allow us to freely edit our posts or topics to make corrections as needed, so please remember to look for subsequent posts if you see any mistakes or outdated information. Sorry for the inconvenience.